Customers may need to hold (e.g., retain) documents for various reasons (e.g., documents that are part of on-going litigation or investigation). When a document is placed on hold, the document is not deleted until the hold is removed. This allows documents to be kept (e.g., for legal reasons) and then deleted when appropriate (e.g., when the legal action is resolved).
A content management system may be described as managing unstructured data, such as documents, videos, audio, etc. The content management system allows creation of hold containers, and documents may be placed into the hold containers.
A current practice to place a hold on documents is to create one or more hold containers to store and manage a group of hold documents. A hold link relationship is created between the hold container and hold documents in that hold container to archive hold capability. With this solution, once one document version is put on-hold, the other existing versions and the versions created in the future will be on hold automatically. Also, if a hold is removed from any version of this document, then the hold is removed from all versions of the document, and the other versions may be deleted. Moreover, if there is a maximum version constraint on a document, and there is a hold on that document, then, once the maximum number of versions have been created, it is not possible to delete one version to create another version.